On CECCHI D'AMICO: book—

On CECCHI D'AMICO: articles—

Sight and Sound
(London), Winter 1986–87.

Filmihullu
(Helsinki), no. 2, 1989.

Iskussstvo Kino
(Moscow), no. 5, 1997.

* * *

Suso Cecchi d'Amico is undoubtedly best known as Visconti's
regular scriptwriter, however her work, either alone or in collaboration,
with a large number of other directors is at the core of a long list of
films which embodies the development of postwar Italian cinema from
Blasetti to De Sica, from Rosi to Zeffirelli and Antonioni. It is
undoubtedly a tribute to her work that her scripts achieve a certain
"transparency," becoming all-but-inextricable from the
finished film itself.

She has all too modestly described her work as akin to that of the
artisan. This emphasizes her professionalism, the literate
well-craftedness of her scripts, and her endless adaptability to the
contrasting needs of filmmakers working within competing stylistic
conventions. It glosses over the acuteness of her appraisal of particular
projects and particular directors. Luigi Comencini may be no great
stylist, as she has remarked, his films stand or fall by their overall
effect.
Cuore
is a tender and ironic melodrama but anchored cogently to moments in
Italian history. Zampa may be a minor talent but with
Vivere in pace
Cecchi d'Amico wrote to the project's integrity and
antiheroic pacifism. Her script gives Genina's strange melodrama
about a peasant girl's rape and subsequent sanctification,
Heaven over the Marshes
, a much-needed steely quality.

Writing for De Sica made other demands. Cecchi d'Amico has spoken
of his need "to borrow from and reproduce" reality, a need
that predated any theorization of neorealism. The moral catch-22 behind
The Bicycle Thief
lends De Sica's slice-of-life a bitter edge. Her collaboration
with Francesco Rosi has been equally rewarding. A trial transcript
provided the source for Salvatore Giuliano's script, the framework
for a film of epic dimension honed from events both sordid and sadly
routine. But where she worked with a director whose own drive was towards
honing away excesses and revealing a structure, the results were less
happy. Where Antonioni saw his films as the bare rendition of reality,
Cecchi d'Amico saw contemporary fables.

It was the opportunity posed by working for Visconti with his concern for
the firm location of characters within a specific time, place, and history
that drew from her her best work. She has said that his clarity of vision
and sureness made him an easy person to work for, and there is an obvious
complementarity between her spareness and Visconti's rhetorical
visual style. Initial efforts for him required
copious pruning to adapt them to his particular "cinematic
rhythm." So completely did Visconti make his projects his own that
they escape the category of "literary adaptation," and are
rewritten and reformed to his own vision. Where a subject interested him
but a suitable text could not be found, Cecchi d'Amico has spoken
of the preparation of a script only after a considerable amount of
research had been done. Even a contemporary subject might have a literary
analogue. Thus Dostoyevsky was a touchstone for
Rocco and His Brothers
.

Rocco
, an original story, knits its moral conundrum into a precisely located
mise-en-scène, as it follows the attempts of a Southern peasant
family to adjust to a new life in the North, and in doing so charts the
stresses attendant upon Italy's own path to industrialization. The
script's major coup is the withholding of an explicit statement of
the immigrant's code of morality until the final section, where it
acquires an especially revelatory force, marking a passage from the
certainties of an agrarian society, to notions of compromise embodied in a
trade-off between rights and duties. The concern for morality and
betrayal, personal and national history present here also underlie many of
her other projects for Visconti,
The Innocent
,
Senso
,
Ludwig
, and
Conversation Piece
.

The same concerns give her extraordinary gallery of female characters a
memorable distinctiveness. Often transgressive they are always true to
their time and place and never airbrushed into stereotype. Another
consistent thread has been her collaborations with Monicelli, a director
known for his humorously ironic tales of bourgeois life. The recent
Il male oscuro
was scripted with Tonino Guerra from a prizewinning sixties novel
(translated as
Incubus
in the United States) by Giuseppe Berto. It studies the relationships
between a mediocre writer undergoing analysis, his younger wife, and his
obsessive, ambivalent relationship with his father. The family theme is
continued with
Parenti serpenti
, also made in the nineties, an examination of the tensions that arise as
three generations of an extended family attempt Christmas together. Humor
and irony also underlie her contributions to the script for
Mikhalkov's
Oci ciornie
.

Her experience of writing a supposedly "Ben Hecht" script
for Wyler's
Roman Holiday
(she took the job out of admiration for the director), which involved
stringing together a series of banal generic elements, merely confirmed
her observations of the wholly pernicious effect of Hollywood's
postwar incursion into Italian filmmaking. (The Italian industry was, in
her opinion, to be destroyed and the country opened up as a market for
U.S. product.) There were other international co-productions occasionally;
the Taylor-Burton
The Taming of the Shrew
for which her early experience as a translator into Italian of English
literature might have, in part, prepared her, and on which she worked with
Paul Dehn. But her preoccupations lay elsewhere. Cecchi d'Amico has
always believed in the necessity of developing a national cinema that
would "tell its own stories." It has been an unstinting
dedication to this principle which underlies her work.

—Verina Glaessner

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